


When I Say When

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:56:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3153083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four ways it might have happened...</p>
<p>For Leobrat's prompt: How <i>were</i> Alex and Izzie meant to have a baby?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If Everything Could Ever Feel This Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leobrat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leobrat/gifts).



**[if everything could ever feel this real…]**

She buys pregnancy tests. Plural. Throws them into her shopping cart alongside shampoo and whole wheat flour and a package of pre-grated Monterey Jack. The girl at the check-out doesn’t comment, though Izzie imagines the words must be on the tip of her tongue.

It takes her two goes to get her PIN correct.

“Good luck,” say the girl, a metal rod through her lower lip and a name-tag that says Jess. “Whatever answer you’re hoping for, good luck.”

Izzie manages a smile and a nod and giggle that she thinks sounds a little like mania.

What answer _is_ she hoping for?

 

 

The house is dark when she gets home. A text message from Alex half an hour ago, while she’d been stopped, impatient, at a red light, her phone tossed onto the passenger seat, had announced he’d be late. 

He’d bring pizza.

He’s sorry.

He’ll make it up to her. He promises.

She’d smiled at that, slow and warm, let her eyes drop closed and her head tilt back against the rest, soft music and light breeze, and something else, something unfamiliar. 

The lights had changed then, the car behind her interrupting her daydream with a cutting blast of horn. She’d jump on the gas, jerked her car into a forward motion and offered up an apologetic wave through her rear window.

Oops.

 

 

She pretends, for about seven minutes, that she’s going to wait. That she’s going to shower. That she’s going to make a cup of tea and wash their sheets and put the Monterey Jack in the fridge.

For seven whole minutes she pretends she’s going to do all of those things.

It ticks over to the eighth and she’s bundling up the tests, plural, and tripping over her own feet as she climbs the stairs towards the bathroom on the second floor.

Pees on three sticks in quick succession. Lines them up, evenly spaced, one after the other on the edge of the tub.

Waits.

 

 

She’s mid-movie when Alex walks in. She hears his keys drop onto the kitchen counter, the staccato tap of his footsteps across the hardwood, a sound she’d know in her sleep.

“Hey,” he says, his voice, a low rumble that thrums through her bloodstream, reaches all the way to her toes.

“Hey, yourself,” she answers back, leans into his hands as he buries them in the curls at the nape of her neck.

He rounds the couch then, slumps down beside her with a satisfied sigh, tilts his head til it’s cushioned on her shoulder.

“What’s news?” he says, stifles a yawn before twisting slightly, pressing his lips against the curve of her jaw.

“What’s news?” she echoes, threading her fingers loosely through his and bouncing their hands lightly against his thigh, “Funny you should ask me that, actually…”


	2. Waste Away With Me

**[waste away with me…]**

Meredith finds him. He’s in the tunnels, hiding.  
(I’m not hiding, he tells her, and she nods, eyes wide, like maybe she even believes him)  
His knees are pulled up towards his chest, his fingers linked together and looped around his shins. He’s counting, slowly, backwards from eleven thousand, eight hundred and four. In seventeens. When he stops, he thinks he might vomit, so he goes back to counting, slowly, backwards.  
(Have you spoken to her? he asks, and Meredith nods again, eyes still wide, unblinking)  
She’s freaking out and he finds that oddly comforting because, fuck, so is he.

 

 

There’d been this week. Seven full days of stupidity and sex and screaming at each other in the shadows.   
(I hate you. Why do you have to be such a bitch. Don’t fucking touch me. Ass. Jerk. Oh god. Yes. More. Harder, harder, harderharderharder)  
When you’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on, it can be easy to lose your mind, to forget things. Little things.  
Big things.  
(I want you inside of me. Now. Okay.)

 

 

They’re not even really together. They get drunk and they have sex and they glare at each other in the morning and vow it’s never going to happen again.  
(We can’t keep doing this, she says)  
He grunts and rolls onto his side and pulls the sex-twisted sheet up and over his head as she retrieves her limbs and scrapes together what remains of her dignity. Leaves him to sleep in a pool of his own self-loathing.

 

 

She spends Monday morning doubled over the toilet bowl in the interns’ locker room. Meredith’s with her, holding her hair back and feeding her water or whatever it is that girls do when other girls are retching and gagging and crying.  
(Fuck, he says, to no-one)  
O’Malley keeps walking past, giving him passive aggressive death stares and shaking his head. Dripping, silently, with disapproval.  
(Fuck off, he says, out loud this time)

 

Yang brings a blood collection kit and sends the contents to pathology under a pseudonym she spends entirely too much time thinking up.  
(Jersey Shore, she says, laughs, thinks she’s fucking hilarious)  
He can hear Izzie groaning, like maybe she’s dying or giving birth already, then and there. He thinks of Amber and green grass and the tiniest toes he thought he’d ever, ever see. Her mewling kitten face and the way her fingers used to wrap themselves around his, a reflex.

 

 

He walks then, fast, faster, like maybe he can outrun the inevitable.   
Goes to the tunnels to hide from his ghosts. Counts backwards, slowly, from eleven thousand, eight hundred and four.  
In seventeens.


	3. You Gotta Promise Not To Stop

**[you gotta promise not to stop…]**

She drives all night. All day. Half the next night. Stops for gas and cigarettes and barely recognises her own reflection when she dares stare at herself in the tarnished truck-stop mirror.

She hasn’t smoked since she was seventeen. Lights one from the dying embers of the last now and uses the nicotine and the volume knob on her car’s radio to keep her awake and mostly functioning as she chews up the miles between Seattle and Iowa City. 

He’s holding up the bar when she gets there, leaned against the dirty wood with one hip, his back to her as she walks heavily through the door, closes the feet and inches of space between them in several staggered strides.

She turns him to face her viciously, her hands on his shoulders, muscles _screaming_.

His mouth drops open, like maybe he’s got something to say. An attempt at an explanation.  
Maybe even an apology.

Ha. She laughs even though he’s stalled to silent. Laughs at her own thoughts in her head. Bitter, borderline hysterical. Shuts herself up as she forces her lips over his, her tongue against his teeth, the weight of her body into the space between his thighs.

The heat of him is intoxicating. Mixes with the sleep deprivation and the fear. With the fury and the stale tang of ash in the back of her throat. 

He’s hard against her crotch and she grinds her hips, rakes her fingernails down the back of his neck, moans into his mouth as he grabs her ass, pulls her tight against the front of his jeans. 

She pulls him up to standing, motions towards the restrooms and dares break away long enough to breathe in, breathe out. Once, twice, three times.

They disappear into a stall in the men’s room. The thumping bass from the band out in the main bar area vibrates the thin door at her back as she thumbs her underwear over her hips, her naked ass pressed back against the cold laminex. 

He picks her up, wraps her knees around his waist, his jeans now puddled, a pool of dirty denim at his feet as he lifts her top, drags her bra loose, catches her left nipple lightly between his front teeth before closing his lips around it, sucking.

Everything inside her clenches. She arches her back, bangs her head against the door, bangs it again. Grabs his face in both hands and pulls it up, kisses him hard and fast and desperate and sure while he pushes inside her, hot and wet and tight. He adjusts and readjusts and she hoists herself up his hips again, bucking, eyes slammed closed, her arms wrapped tight now, around his neck.

And when she climaxes, she muffles the sound of her orgasm into the crook of her own elbow.


	4. Breathe Out, So I Can Breathe You In

**[breathe out, so I can breathe you in…]**

At first.

He tells himself it’s  
 _a muscle strain._  
From impromptu pickup matches with Hunt and O’Malley in the ambulance bay. Or, maybe,  
an entirely different kind of physical activity.  
With Izzie.

Only with Izzie.

Then, later,  
an old wrestling injury that flares up when the snow flurries about his ankles like a  
stray cat.

 

 

He limps, not outwardly. Not in the beginning, anyway. Absorbs the dull ache inside himself, his movements  
deliberately controlled,  
walking, standing, climbing  
Running.

Izzie laughs.  
Calls him an  
 _old man._  
Covers the skin across his left hip with kisses.  
Soft and then hard.  
Harder.

Sucks him off in the shower, on her knees, as he holds his breath and threads his fingers through her water darkened curls.

Remains upright  
 _just._

 

 

Torres calls him on his crap.

She says, what’s wrong with you?, and frowns over her surgical mask as he  
shifts and  
swallows and  
shuts his eyes.  
Opens them again.

Nothing, he says.  
 _I’m fine…_

Bullshit, she doesn’t say.  
She doesn’t need to.

 

 

Izzie kisses the back of his  
hand.

Butterfly wings flap against his skin and  
deep in his guts.

She disappears from view as the bed beneath him whirs. Drags him into the yawning mouth of the MRI machine.

It’s loud. And  
cold.

He is always cold. Now.

 

 

Meredith’s mouth opens. He tells her  
No.  
Not her. Not from her.  
Says he doesn’t want her platitudes even though it’s actually the  
fear in her eyes  
that sends his heartbeat tripping. Double time. 

_No._

 

 

They’re going to pump his bloodstream full of  
poison  
and slice surgical steel through his skin.  
Cut away the rotten parts of him and  
irradiate  
his bones.

Izzie sits, legs crossed, at the end of his bed. Mascara mixes with salt water and  
drips  
drips  
drips.  
Stains the front of her scrubs a dark blue, black.

 

 

Alex, she says. Alex, Alex, Alex, until he no longer recognises the word.  
Until he no longer recognises  
her.

 

 

Specialists speak familiar sentences at him that are suddenly entirely foreign. Yang  
scribbles notes.  
Endless pages that she highlights and circles and calculates and scrutinises.

Nods her head. Shakes her head. Listens to all the words Izzie  
 _can’t_  
and he  
 _won’t._

 

 

We should try to get pregnant, Izzie says  
quiet  
so quiet  
we should do it now  
right now  
we should do it now because…

He’s in a private room. Meredith stands guard while Izzie  
cries  
and Alex  
refuses to cry  
and it’s gentle and slow and he thinks  
maybe  
they are already ghosts.


End file.
